There aren't many better recording quartets these days than the Emerson String Quartet . . . this is one of the more irresistible string quartet sets to come along in a very long while. This is one ensemble that simply doesn't make discs that are anything other than exemplary both in rhythmic virtuosity and lyric sensitivity, both of which are required all the way through these melodically rich pieces . . . Terrific.

Record Review /
Jeff Simon,
Buffalo News / 25. April 2010

Played with smooth elegance by the New York City-based Emerson String Quartet, the music defines the composer at his romantic best . . .

For decades, the Emersons have held a position of unrivalled eminence, their crisp, forceful sound banishing memories of scrappy quartet concerts of yore. Yet Dvorák¿s music poses a particular challenge for this disciplined group. The scores often seem designed to force professional players out of their routines. The Emersons relaxed somewhat for the occasion, happily flirting with chaos in episodes such as the trilling coda of the quintet . . . the Emersons¿ sonic weight and tensile phrasing brought substantial rewards.

Record Review /
Alex Ross,
New Yorker / 07. June 2010

These are outstanding readings all, showing the Emerson to be at peak strength in this repertory . . . [here] they delve into a short cycle that proves them as adept as any quartet in the world at navigating Dvorák¿s quirky stylistic meanderings . . . [DGG¿s sound]: they give the Emerson a broad sound stage with excellent depth and decent bass. This one . . . takes its place among the finest exponents of this body of music.

Record Review /
Steven Ritter,
Audiophile Audition / 09. June 2010

. . . with the first few bars of the String Quartet No. 10, you recognize the joyous, springy step of this Czech composer . . . It's like being plunged into a forest of pines and birch and aspen, with a warm wind blowing and birds twittering and where it's rarely nighttime . . . there is nothing they cannot do. Listening to them is like watching a master painter who knows instinctively where to put a daub of paint. If anything, the naivete of Dvořák's music inspires a fresh playfulness in their playing. Solo voices sing out with vibrato and portamento, then fall back into an infinite variety of rich textures. (Listen to the interplay of first violin and tutti in Cypresses, No. 6.) The recording acoustic of the American Academy of Arts & Letters in New York provides a warm envelope in which nothing is lost.

Record Review /
David Perkins,
Boston Globe / 06. July 2010

These fine new recordings build on qualities that over the years have become indelibly associated with this quartet's profile: clean-edged attack, a suave, subtly varied body of tone, fine-tuned personalities within the group and an overall clarity of vision . . . this is really beautiful quartet playing, with inner parts that are both transparent and well integrated, and that gives the essential impression of four superb musicians sharing matters of vital import.

Record Review /
Rob Cowan,
Gramophone (London) / 01. August 2010

It¿s music that makes you feel glad to be alive and it¿s hard to imagine it better played.

Record Review /
Classic FM (London) / 25. August 2010

The Emersons' are interpretations that demand to be heard . . . The Emersons have thought very deeply about this repertoire and their affection and profound experience of this music is evident everywhere . . . there is much to marvel at in these treasurable performances.

Having enjoyed stable membership for more than 30 years, they're sounding better than ever nowadays: still with all the old tightknit concentration and fearsome technical command of their classic Beethoven and Bartók cycles from the 1980s, but now tempered with a new depth, subtlety of coloring, and a breathing rhythmic suppleness to complement the thrilling élan of their youthful days (though there's still plenty of that when it's needed) . . . by any standards these new Emerson performances are among the most distinguished available, and are very strongly recommended.

Dvořák's Chamber Music for Strings

Classical Forms, Slavonic and American Colors

Antonín Dvořák composed string quartets throughout his career. As a trained violinist who earned his living for some years playing the viola in Prague orchestras, and as an occasional participant in quartet parties, he wrote for the medium with great understanding of its potential range of colors and textures. (Players will tell you, though, that once he got involved in a work, considerations of ease of fingering soon went out of the window.) His early quartets were experimental essays, in which he gradually worked out how to curb his enthusiasm for relentless key changes and exhaustive development and to create effective, if not always conventional, formal structures. The later quartets were written for publishers to sell to the domestic chamber-music market, but also for the specialist professional ensembles which in the later 19th century were beginning to establish the string quartet in public concerts.

More generally, the choice of the quartet medium shows Dvořák's eagerness to align himself, in at least part of his output, with the tradition of abstract composition stemming from Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, rather than with the operatic and programmatic “new music" of Liszt and Wagner. It is significant that he dedicated a quartet, No. 9 in D minor, op. 34 (B.75 = no.75 in Jarmil Burghauser's chronological catalogue of Dvořák's music), to the leading figure of the conservative school, his friend and mentor Brahms. But at the same time his adherence to the Classical tradition was colored to varying degrees by the Slavonic elements which he knew enhanced the appeal of his music outside the Czech lands, and which were in any case ingrained in his musical language.

This stylistic question looms large in the Quartet No. 10 in E flat major, op. 51 (B. 92), which Dvořák composed between Christmas Day 1878 and the end of March 1879. The work had been requested by the German violinist Jean Becker for his celebrated Florentine Quartet, and he had asked specifically for something “Slavonic", reflecting the recent success of Dvořák's first set of Slavonic Dances and his string sextet in a similar vein. Accordingly, the predominantly lyrical opening movement (which has an unconventional recapitulation, withholding the first theme until near the end) is permeated by hints of the lilting rhythm of the Czech polka. And the second movement is named after the Ukrainian lament called the dumka, which for Dvořák signified an alternation between slow and faster music - the two quick sections in this case being based on a transformation of the opening theme into the fast triple time with cross-rhythms of the Bohemian furiant. Then, after a gentle Romance with some imaginative coloring in the middle section and the reprise, the finale is dominated by its opening theme in the swaggering Bohemian dance rhythm of the skoèná.

Dvořák composed his next string quartet, the Quartet No. 11 in C major, op. 61 (B. 121), in three or four weeks in October and November 1881, when, engrossed in work on his opera Dimitrij, he was suddenly reminded that he had promised to write a new piece for the Viennese quartet led by the violinist Joseph Hellmesberger, and that the intended performance date was imminent. The association with Vienna seems to have led Dvořák to lay less emphasis than usual on national or Slavonic coloring, and to write a work more directly in the tradition of Beethoven and Schubert - with, moreover, some remarkably advanced chromatic harmony in places. The first movement is a big structure with a wealth of melodic ideas, but dominated by the distinctive rising figure first heard in the second bar. The slow movement is a romantic idyll, characteristically full of accompanying detail and with some magical switches of key. The Scherzo, based on the rising figure of the first movement, has an extended duple-time Trio. The Finale includes a lyrical second subject with a Brahmsian richness of coloring, as a counterbalance to the Slavonic-tinged athleticism of the main theme.

The next Dvořák quartet to appear in print was No.8 in E major (B. 57) of 1876, which was issued in 1888 with the misleadingly high opus number of 80. But meanwhile Dvořák had created an unusual suite for quartet which was not published in his lifetime, Cypřiše (Cypresses) (B. 152). Its origins lie in one of his earliest compositions, a song cycle written in the summer of 1865 on a sequence of 18 short poems by the Czech writer Gustav Pfleger-Moravský. The poems center on the theme of disappointed love, and Dvořák presumably chose them because of his own unrequited love at the time for the actress Josefina Èermáková (whose sister Anna he later married). Although the original songs remained unpublished, they were clearly close to Dvořák's heart: he quoted themes from them in some of his works of the 1870s, and in 1881/82 and 1888 he revised two groups of them for publication. In addition, in April and May 1887, he transcribed a dozen of the songs for string quartet, calling them Ohlas písní, or Echoes of Songs. The title of Cypresses - referring to a tree with funereal associations - was restored when they were published in 1921, in a shortened and reworked version by Dvořák's son-in-law Josef Suk, and was retained for the first authentic edition in 1957. The transcriptions lengthen some of the songs, and add some accompanying detail; but they remain essentially faithful to the originals, with the melodies chiefly assigned to the first violin or viola. Their recollections of youthful emotion in mature tranquillity give the sequence a uniquely touching quality.
Dvořák spent three years between 1892 and 1895 in the USA, as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. During the summer of 1893, resting from his labors at the conservatory and on the “New World" Symphony, he took a holiday with his family in Spillville, Iowa, a rural community largely of Czech origin. There, during June, he composed his best known quartet, No. 12 in F major, op. 96 (B. 179), the “American" (which the Emerson Quartet has already recorded), and then, between 26 June and 1 August, the Quintet in E flat major, op. 97 (B. 180) (with second viola). The Quintet is in the “American" vein of the “New World" and the Quartet, suggested by spirituals and popular songs - above all in the first movement, the themes of which grow out of the melody in the dreaming (but in-tempo) introduction. Native American drumming may also have played a part, as the source of the persistent rhythmic figure of the duple-time scherzo. The heart of the work is its slow movement, a set of variations on a theme which turns halfway through from minor to major. The finale is an extended rondo, with a lively main theme and two alternating subsidiary ideas providing strong contrasts.

Dvořák's last two quartets, surprisingly neglected compared to the “American", date from shortly after his return to Prague. The Quartet No. 13 in G major, op.106 (B. 192) took him little more than five weeks in November and early December 1895. Its first movement begins with a joyful open-air idea, later offset by a more hesitant melody in triplet rhythms. The deeply felt slow movement is based on a single theme, which returns in rondo fashion but is also developed in two accelerating episodes, the second arriving at a grandioso climax of resonant chords. The light-footed scherzo has a subsidiary idea over a pattern of interlocking ostinatos, a trio with some folklike drones, and a shortened reprise. The finale begins, like that of Tchaikovsky's string serenade, with a short slow introduction prefiguring the descending scales of the “fiery" main theme. This introduction returns later at greater length, leading unexpectedly to the hesitant melody of the first movement, which is then absorbed into a complex developmental struggle - “as though", wrote the Dvořák scholar Otakar Šourek, “the approach of old age cast involuntarily a dark shadow on this utterance of careless joy".

Dvořák began writing his Quartet No. 14 in A flat major, op. 105 (B. 193) in New York in March 1895, but broke off a little way into the first movement; he returned to it in Prague immediately after writing the Gmajor, and completed it before the end of the year. The work begins with a minor-key slow introduction, with a turning figure that immediately returns in the first theme of the main Allegro, and pervades the rest of the movement (which, unusually for a first movement as opposed to a finale, has a form conflating recapitulation and development). The second movement is a scherzo in the infectious rhythm of the furiant, with a contrasting rhapsodic trio section. The third is a dreamy slow movement, with a dark-colored central section rising to an impassioned climax, and a light-textured reprise of the main theme with hints of birdsong. The finale characteristically combines intensive working of the distinctive rhythm heard at the outset with generosity of melodic invention. It makes a fitting conclusion to Dvořák's long engagement both with abstract composition - his remaining major works were all symphonic poems and operas - and with the medium of the string quartet that was so close to his heart.